


Life After Lisa

by Josselin



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Torchwood, Weiß Kreuz
Genre: M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-18
Updated: 2007-07-18
Packaged: 2017-11-03 15:06:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Josselin/pseuds/Josselin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sir, the baby is watching us."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's all crazy. :) Usually I try to exercise a modicum of self-restraint, but uh, not this time. This was my preposterous idea fic, where whatever I thought of, no matter how insane, went in the mix. Many thanks to [](http://wrenlet.livejournal.com/profile)[**wrenlet**](http://wrenlet.livejournal.com/) and [](http://julad.livejournal.com/profile)[**julad**](http://julad.livejournal.com/) for their support while I was writing.

Time passes differently for Ianto since Lisa died. Sometimes things speed up for him, and in the space it takes Gwen and Tosh to bitch to each other about the weather he's relived all of the times they had tea together on Lisa's balcony. It seems, in his memory, like something they did often, a staple of their life together. Ianto had actually taken out a calendar and dissected it--he does this, sometimes, prodding at the wound in an effort to make himself feel something, anything at all in contrast to the vast emptiness--looking at the hours they'd worked and the amount of time they'd been together and the times he estimated he'd gone over to her flat and the time they lived together. When he totalled that all he decided that in actuality he and Lisa had probably only drank tea on her balcony somewhere between fourteen and sixteen times. The idea that fourteen to sixteen times is all you need to create an eternity is both frightening and oddly reassuring.

Since Ianto has known him, Jack has died on seven separate occasions. That eternity might be next.

So sometimes time speeds up, and other times it slows down, making Ianto feel like a film done with stop-motion photography, like he is moving at a normal pace but everything else around him is blurring by, entire days and seasons passing by in seconds and minutes while he takes a sip of coffee. Sometimes Ianto sits at his desk and holds Jack's stopwatch in his hand and feels his heart beating in time with the ticking in his hand. Jack catches him doing this once and gives him a suggestive leer, perhaps trying to catch up where their previous plans for a tryst had been interrupted by a weevil sighting, but Ianto is slow to catch on and his bland smile seems to unnerve the captain.

An alien of a type even Jack has never seen before pops up near Gloucester and begins leaving a trail of withered, aged corpses behind it. It regenerates inconveniently and has weapons that make Jack envious, and Torchwood 3's first encounter with it is notably unsuccessful. They lose the trail and come back to the base for better weapons and research. Ianto looks at pictures, but he hasn't decided on a name for the alien yet--some feeling inside tells him to hold off--and Jack impatiently calls the thing "that bastard" until he's pulled into a call with the American president.

Ianto had put the American president on hold while he found Jack and brought him the phone.

Toshiko and Gwen speculate on what the call could possibly mean; Ianto makes coffee.

The call, Jack tells them all, heralds the arrival of a second alien, this one sent by some secret American institution--Jack seems dismayed by this discovery--to help hunt down the alien that has eluded them. The second alien's name is Ronon Dex, and Ianto and Jack go to meet him at the helicopter pad.

Most men look right past Ianto when they first meet him, which is the result of slight effeminacy and not quite looking them in the eye, but this alien--man--pays an unusual amount of attention to Ianto right from when they first meet. Ronon continues staring at Ianto as Ianto drives the three of them back to the base, even as Jack attempts to draw Ronon into conversation. Though Ronon does seem fluent in English, he does not seem like much of a conversationalist.

Jack asks Ronon where he's from, how his trip was, what the name of the secret American institution was again, and what Ronon does, and receives two grunts, a skeptical look, and a terse, "I hunt Wraith."

Wraith. Ianto mulls over the word to himself and decides that it fits the creature well.

After his next conversational volleys are equally unsuccessful, Jack gives up on talking with their visitor and hums distractedly to himself while looking out the window. Ianto drives and watches Ronon in the mirror, and Ronon looks back at Ianto and sometimes sidelong at Jack with an amused expression.

Toshiko says that the new weapons she's found in the archives need to charge off the generator overnight, so when they get back to the Hub, Jack asks Ianto to show Ronon some Welsh hospitality. Ianto plans to. He's recognized the way Ronon looks at him, now, and he suspects Jack has as well, and that the captain is jealous.

He leads Ronon to the room he prepared for their visitor earlier and offers him a beverage, something to eat, an extra blanket.

Ronon declines, and Ianto says, "Well, if there's nothing further I can get for you," but his actions belie his words. He's not making any move to leave the room, and in fact he's walking across the room toward Ronon as he speaks. When Ianto is close enough for Ronon to touch, Ronon does, curling one hand with his palm around Ianto's jaw and his fingers ruffling the hair on the back of his neck. They stand together for a moment in perfect agreement, and then Ronon takes a step away and points at Ianto.

"I don't understand your clothing at all," Ronon says, sitting down on the bed, "so you had better take it off yourself."

Ianto smirks back at him, and nods, and then flips the lights off using the switch near the door. He has a small flashlight in his pocket, and he uses it to cross the room and join Ronon on the bed, and then he switches it off again and puts it down on the small table next to the bed.

"I don't get to watch?" Ronon asks, low and quiet.

"You can touch," Ianto tells him. "There's a camera in the corner."

Ianto is stripping himself efficiently as they talk, and Ronon's hands get in the way as they wander around trying to see Ianto in the dark.

"They're still going to know," Ronon says, and Ianto can hear the amusement in his voice.

"There's a difference between knowing and knowing," Ianto says calmly, putting emphasis on the second knowing to make sure Ronon understands what he means, but it doesn't seem like Ronon cares any longer, because Ianto's chest is bare and Ronon is eagerly applying himself to licking his way down it.

Ronon stops suddenly, and Ianto drops his belt onto the floor.

"You're not a slave, are you?" Ronon asks.

"Pardon?" Ianto says automatically, and he tries to decide if this question is insulting or not.

"It's just," Ronon says, "I don't like doing it with slaves--feels like cheating." But having asked his question he seems not to care all that much about the response, because he reapplies himself to licking down Ianto's chest before Ianto can pull together any kind of reply.

He considers a statement about Earth and civilized nations and their concepts of liberty, or a statement about his loyalty to Queen and Crown, something about the legal age of consent. Then he thinks about Jack and Torchwood and Lisa and Jack again. Instead of answering he reaches, pulls Ronon up on the bed over him, manages to unfasten Ronon's pants in the dark and reach his hand inside, and then, with his hand strategically wrapped around Ronon's cock, he asks, "Does this feel like cheating?" and the entire question of slavery becomes irrelevant.

**

Ianto doesn't go along on the second Wraith hunting expedition, but he hears from Owen over the radio that apparently: one, Ronon is a tracking genius; two, the key to killing a Wraith is to shoot and just keep shooting; and three, there were a lot of witnesses so could Ianto please smooth things over with the local police.

It only takes a few minutes to tidy up the loose ends.

The team returns to the Hub. Owen and Gwen seem enthusiastic about Ronon now that he's proven himself; Tosh seems a bit intimidated but admiring. Jack is in a foul mood and snaps that his coffee is cold. It's not true, but Ianto apologizes anyway, and as he takes the captain's cup away with a promise to replace it he can feel Jack's eyes lingering on his back.

Ronon is familiar with some Earth technology--he handles weaponry easily and isn't surprised by computers though Ianto suspects he may not know how to use one himself. But some things are surprising to him, and he acts like the curry Ianto ordered in for the team is manna from the heavens. Owen smirks noticeably at Ronon's difficulties with a fork, but Ianto pastes on a bland smile as usual and refills the plates that are passed his way. Jack's scowl deepens, and midway through the meal he leaves the table for his office.

After the rest of the team has finished eating, Jack reemerges and announces that he's going to take Ronon back to the airport.

Ianto stands up from the table reflexively. "I'll take care of it, sir," he offers.

"No, no," Jack says with a broad and entirely fake grin. "Go home early. I'll do it." Jack already has his jacket on and the keys to one of the SUVs dangling in his hand.

"Let me get your things," Ianto offers to Ronon, and Ronon shrugs, so Ianto hurries off to fetch his pack from the room where he was staying. They have a moment of semi-privacy in the hallway as Ronon accepts his pack when Ianto returns.

"I like you," Ronon tells him.

"I guessed," Ianto answers with a wry smile.

Ronon's eyes flicker across the base to where Jack is waiting impatiently. "The captain likes you too."

"Yes," Ianto agrees. He's always known Jack was fond of him, and has sometimes abused that.

"Is he a good man?" Ronon asks, and the direction this conversation is taking makes Ianto feel far too much like someone's handmaid or betrothed daughter.

Jack has faults, many of them, and Ianto knows more of them than almost anyone else on Earth. "He is," Ianto answers shortly. Ronon raises an eyebrow. "But I'm not sure that I am," Ianto continues. He stands straight and looks Ronon in the eye as he says it.

Ronon grins back at him, and then he is off, standing next to Jack on the lift. Both Ronon and Jack look down at Ianto as they move toward the ceiling, and Ianto looks up briefly. He isn't sure where to let his eyes rest, though, and it is easier to let them refocus on the dishes that need clearing from the table.

**

Jack remains unaccountably foul-tempered long after Ronon has flown back to the United States (and from there back to whatever universe he came from, presumably). He's peevish with Ianto, complaining about that his coffee is too hot, that this morning he wanted tea instead, that Ianto printed a briefing on the front and back of a piece of paper when Jack needed space to take notes, that Ianto printed the next briefing on two pages and wasted paper. He yells at Owen for slacking off and proceeds to spend hours of his own time pacing back and forth in his office.

At night, he drinks, more than any man should reasonably be able to drink. Ianto tries to avoid him.

(The last time that Jack was this drunk, Ianto was the one who woke up hungover, on a cot in one of Torchwood's spare rooms, with a disturbing blank space in his memory, fourteen hours he couldn't account for, and an odd welt on his back that looked like nothing but a strike from a leather belt.)

A week and a half after Ronon has left, a million things might have happened to have taken Torchwood 3's minds off of their one alien visitor. But when Jack finds Ianto in the back storage room, spreads his arms to brace himself in the doorway, and says sharply, "I thought your loyalty was to *Lisa*," both of them know exactly what Jack is talking about.

Ianto stands up from where he was labeling things on the lowest shelf and tucks his pen carefully into it's slot on the clipboard. "Sir--can I get you--"

"Shut up," Jack cuts him off.

Ianto bites his tongue and inclines his head once, sharply, to indicate his agreement.

Jack runs a hand through his hair and takes a step into the storage room, letting the door swing shut behind him. "I--that's not what I meant."

Ianto licks his lips almost nervously, and says in an even voice, "Are you jealous of me, or him?"

Jack looks furious, but Ianto continues. "You don't care if I'm loyal to Lisa or not. You only care because you can't figure out whether or not I'm loyal to you, and it drives you insane, wondering. You need loyalty; blind loyalty; simpering, affectionate loyalty; and that's why you fill Torchwood with people like Gwen and Tosh and Suzie, even when you know they aren't strong enough to take it, that it's only a matter of time until they each crack from the strain."

"You have no right--" Jack shouts, bringing his fist down hard on one of the storage shelves.

"No right?" Ianto echoes, astounded. "No right? No right to criticize a man who covers his mistakes with fucking amnesia pills?" Ianto points out toward the crypt, "I locked Suzie in a box," he hisses, and Jack has been edging closer, trying to get into Ianto's space, tower over him, so Ianto says it directly to Jack's face, looking right into his eyes.

Jack steps even closer and shoves Ianto back against the shelves he'd been categorizing. Jack's hand wraps around the back of Ianto's neck for a second, and their lips meet until Ianto wrests his head to the side.

"You can get me on my knees," he tells Jack, breathing heavily, "but that won't get you in my head." And he jerks himself out of Jack's grasp and escapes out the door before Jack can stop him.

**

Ianto's statement about Jack getting into his head turns out to be portentous, but not right away.

Things happen. Tosh starts seeing someone, a man, a poet, and Jack looks on and beams with paternal affection and watches Tosh and George on CCTV with the protectiveness of a father with a shotgun. Owen develops a theory about natural light and alien plant spores that has them all rewiring the base and replacing all of the lighting. Gwen and Rhys break up, and Gwen is distraught, and then they get back together, and she is still just as miserable. The Thai place in Grangetown closes, and Ianto orders from a new place and no one likes it, but he still can't bring himself to order pizza.

Jack takes a new tactic toward Ianto. He'd been angry, jealous and obvious, but now he tries to woo Ianto with kindness, smiling at him and saying thank you with extra sincerity when Ianto brings him something. He walks past Ianto's desk as he talks on the phone and stops to pat Ianto on the shoulder and absentmindedly play with Ianto's hair before switching the phone to his other hand and continuing to walk on. Ianto erases the nonsense he'd typed mindlessly while Jack was touching him.

Turning Jack down isn't difficult, but it's tiring. Jack is persistent. Ianto isn't entirely surprised to eventually find himself on his back in Jack's bed. The surprise is that Jack's stories didn't exaggerate his oral talents.

Afterward, Ianto extricates himself from Jack's embrace and goes home. At his flat he wraps himself in an old quilt and stares at the wall for a long time, wondering when the paint cracked. Eight o'clock comes and passes and he makes no effort to shower, dress, or go back to the Hub. Jack doesn't call until eleven, at which point he tells Ianto to arrange for a trip for him and Owen to Berlin.

"Why?" Ianto asks, already booting up his computer to book flights.

"Recruitment."

**

Ianto is briefed on their new team member long before the three men make it back to Cardiff. Toshiko is furiously unhappy about the situation, but Jack isn't heeding her advice, and whatever reservations Ianto may personally have about inviting a telepath into Torchwood 3 are resolutely pushed aside in favor of research and preparing a space.

Schuldig--their new team member--is a native German who has spent the last fifteen years in Japan. He has, according to Owen's research, the most advanced form of telepathic powers of any recorded human, and is thus one of the most dangerous beings they've ever encountered. Toshiko thinks inviting him to join Torchwood 3 is a mistake.

Gwen is surprised by the idea of adding yet another person to the team. "Why?" Ianto asks bluntly, and she's flustered.

"I don't know, I suppose. I mean, Jack didn't offer the position to me until Suzie was gone, and I guess--funding?"

Another man might have laughed, but Ianto just made a small noise in the back of his throat. "Torchwood 1 built a skyscraper just to reach a spatial disturbance," he told Gwen, "And you think Jack can't employ a fifth team member?"

Gwen blusters further but Ianto isn't listening any longer. It's true that Jack likes to keep the team small. He doesn't want to be anything like Torchwood 1, and Ianto supposes that is wise. Ianto once overheard Jack suggestively telling Suzie that he liked to keep a small team because it meant he could know each of his team members intimately. Ianto is skeptical of how well Captain Harkness actually knows all of his team members, for obvious reasons, but Jack does a good job of knowing them intimately--several weeks ago Ianto deleted some video files of Jack and Owen making out in the sparring room.

Owen truly seems to fancy women more than men, however, and Ianto suspects that Jack is anxious to know the new team member intimately as well, and he wonders absently how Schuldig will respond. Ianto should perhaps make sure that there is enough fresh supply of the amnesia pill ready, in case Schuldig takes it spectacularly poorly.

Owen and Jack finally arrive with their newest team member. Schuldig is tall, fast, and has noticeable red hair tied back with a yellow bandanna. Owen stalks in with a red face and retreats to the autopsy room. Jack ambles in as casual as ever. Ianto raises an eyebrow at the captain, but Jack just smiles disarmingly. Schuldig takes in the base with a single glance, his eyes flicking from Gwen and Toshiko at their desks to Myfanwy perched on an exposed pipe near the ceiling. Then his eyes land on Ianto, and their restless movements still for a moment as he takes Ianto in. Ianto hopes desperately it's his imagination, but he feels as though he can sense Schuldig rifling through the thoughts in his brain, flipping through them like Jack might through briefings. He tries to focus on innocuous things--what kind of coffee Owen likes, the phone number to ring the Chinese place--but it's as though his mind is out of his control, as though someone else--Schuldig--is in there, focusing a magnifying glass on what he finds interesting and tossing aside the thoughts under which Ianto tries to bury them.

Ianto gives up, then, stops trying to hide anything, and tries instead to broadcast to Schuldig. He opens his mind. "Look at all of it," he invites telepathically, but he adds a promise in there, "I can make keeping my secrets worth your while."

That promise is enough to snap Schuldig's psychic fingers out of his mind, and his eyes move to meet Ianto's. Ianto stares back calmly, meeting Schuldig's assessment.

Jack rests a friendly hand on Schuldig's shoulder and asks, with a grin, "So, what secrets is our smart-looking Ianto keeping from us today?"

Schuldig looks over his shoulder at Jack, and Ianto meets Jack's gaze calmly, wondering if perhaps this moment is precisely why Jack has been so determined to bring Schuldig here. He wonders what Toshiko overheard with her amulet, and how much of it she shared with the captain.

"He hates Glen Miller and when he's feeling irritable he serves decaf," Schuldig says disinterestedly, his eyes flicking around the base again. These things are both true, but they aren't, of course, what Jack was really hoping to hear.

Jack laughs, shakes his fist at Ianto, and threatens dire consequences if he serves decaf in the Hub, and Ianto casts his head down, calls Jack sir, and begs forgiveness for his pettiness.

Ianto hears an echo of Schuldig's voice in his head, rasping, "Why can't I read his mind?" and Ianto thinks, reflexively, "I don't know," and is suddenly confronted with an image/memory of Suzie shooting Jack in the head and the bullet wounds disappearing into unscarred flesh. Ianto gasps, and then he gets the unmistakable impression that Schuldig is teasing him, and a flash of Jack's naked body set against a backdrop that he saw on a brochure when he reserved the hotel rooms in Berlin. All he can think about for a long seven seconds is the drop of sweat rolling down Jack's pectoral muscle, and then the vision is over, and Ianto is leaning back against the railing, almost panting, hoping that his jacket disguises his hard on, and wondering if he's just broken some sort of record for the fastest transition from revulsion to arousal.

"I think you and I are going to have fun," Schuldig promises out loud, and his voice is almost a purr. Jack looks on, and his expression is a mixture of concern and suspicion, and when Schuldig turns to Jack and insists on seeing what are going to be his quarters, Ianto retreats to the toilet to splash water on his face. Life with a telepath was certainly going to be interesting.

**

From the rapidly darkening black eye Owen sports, Ianto suspects that Schuldig and Owen already exchanged blows before they even made it back to the Hub. They quarrel again Schuldig's second day in Torchwood 3. Ianto isn't sure what provoked their altercation, he only arrives up from the lower level in time to see Owen throw the first punch. Schuldig ducks it but gets in a solid hit of his own. Gwen is shrieking at them to stop and act like men, which Ianto knows will never work. Ianto watches for a moment and then tries to surreptitiously slip Gwen's handgun out of her desk drawer.

Jack shows up first and calls Schuldig off with a single word. Schuldig stops fighting, even when Owen takes advantage of Schuldig's distraction to get in a last punch. Ianto makes a note to himself to investigate what kind of hold it is that Jack has over their new team member. If they have to have a loose-cannon telepath, at least Jack seems to have him under control.

**

Like Jack, Schuldig is living on the base, but unlike Jack, he has a habit of blasting German heavy metal, and the Hub has a horrible echo. Ianto arranges to have Schuldig's room soundproofed, but Jack hates to have anyone into the Hub, so Ianto installs the panels himself, drilling brackets into the tiles and ending up with ceramic dust in his hair. Jack fluffs the dust out of his hair fondly and tugs Ianto's wrist to guide him over toward the manhole.

The next week Ianto goes to Schuldig's quarters to gather him for a briefing in the conference room--Schuldig tends to not listen to his comm, and while one might think that he would psychically detect that the entire rest of the team was gathering and thinking about waiting for him, Schuldig is in fact willfully deaf to any such kind of alert. So Ianto fetches him in person, and realizes, when he finds himself pinned up against the new soundproofing panels he'd installed, that soundproofing meant he might scream and Jack would never hear him. At first Schuldig is casually tossing a handgun, and Ianto rather wishes that Jack would hear him, and later, Schuldig is buried in his ass and biting his shoulder, and Ianto again rather wishes that Jack would hear him.

Toshiko gets quite an eyeful when she is sent to figure out why Ianto and Schuldig are both late for the briefing.

Several days later, Ianto opens reception's door to collect the post from the box and finds a basket sitting on the doorstep. He takes a step back and reaches for a weapon he isn't wearing, tries to report with a headset he doesn't have on. He's about to turn inside to alert the others when he hears a faint cry coming from the basket. He crouches down next to it and flips open a white blanket to expose a downy-haired chubby baby just as Schuldig comes up behind. Schuldig does have his weapon drawn and pointed squarely at the infant.

"For God's sake, don't shoot the baby!" Ianto tells him.

But Schuldig shakes his head. "That's no baby," he snarls, and refuses to let Ianto pick it up or take the basket inside.

Ianto steps back inside to ring Jack. "Sir, there's something you should come see right away."

Schuldig looks tempted to just blast the baby away and screw the consequences. Jack looks appalled when he makes it up, and he doesn't hesitate to squat down and pick the baby up, bundling the baby more securely in the white blanket and holding the baby against his chest. The baby's cries fade to a hiccup, but Schuldig is still pointing his gun.

"Schuldig, put the gun down," Jack orders, his voice firm, but the next second he's breaking into a smile and cooing at the baby, who smiles back and bats at Jack's face with one hand.

"Jack, that's no baby," Schuldig insists. "I've felt babies, and they're all 'where's my mother' and 'feed me feed me feed me' and that is not a baby."

"Holster your weapon," Jack says, glaring at Schuldig in a way that doesn't brook opposition. Schuldig holds his eyes for a second and then looks away and lowers his gun.

"Fine," Schuldig mutters. "Don't blame me if the damn thing explodes."

"Sir," Ianto ventures, "Were you expecting to have a baby delivered?"

"It's not a baby," Schuldig says again, to no one in particular.

Jack isn't listening, though. He's unwrapping the baby a bit from its blanket--Ianto can see that the baby (if it is a baby) is a boy--and is holding his hand warmly against the child's chest with a strange look of awe on his face that makes him appear younger than Ianto has ever known him. After a second Jack wraps the baby back up.

"It's not a human baby," Jack agrees with Schuldig, and he looks to Ianto, "Get Owen to the infirmary."

In the next hour they learn two things. One, the baby cries as soon as Jack puts him down, and gurgles happily when Jack picks him up again. Two, the baby is definitely not human. Owen's preliminary scans show that the baby has two hearts. Owen begins to set up additional equipment for further investigation. Jack holds the baby and lets the baby suck contentedly on the end of his smallest finger. Jack calls Ianto over and begins giving him a list of baby supplies he wants Ianto to fetch from the store.

Ianto generally prides himself on taking even Jack's most ridiculous ideas in stride, but he can't help himself this time, and he blurts out, "But you can't be thinking of keeping it."

"Him, Ianto. Him, not it. And yes, of course I'm keeping him. Obviously he was given to us for safekeeping for a reason." He smiles gently at the baby and then looks up at Ianto to share the same smile with him. "You had better start thinking of a name."

**

Gwen and Toshiko both seem to think keeping the baby is a marvelous idea, and Ianto's opinion of each of them lowers further. He feels guarded about the idea himself, convinced that no one else on the team realizes what caring for a baby is actually going to entail, and worried that the infant is going to fall into the rift or something. He begins planning a speech in his head about how he wasn't hired to be a bloody nanny, and takes out his employment contract and reviews it just to make sure there wasn't a clause he was missing.

Schuldig doesn't seem to hate the baby any more than he hates anything else in life or the Hub, but he remains insistent that the baby--Ianto still hasn't named him yet--is not a baby at all. Jack ignores almost everyone except the baby, lavishing attention on the child day and night. He even holds the baby during team meetings, and Ianto is somewhat concerned that the next time there's a weevil sighting Jack will just strap the baby to his back and go take care of it. He doesn't. He passes the baby to Ianto's arms instead, and while the baby starts to fuss, Jack looks into Ianto's eyes and fiercely says, "Guard him."

Jack has held a gun to Ianto's head, and Ianto was not so frightened of him.

**

Ianto names the baby after his own grandfather, Toshiko's father, and Gwen's second uncle. Owen contributes his own middle name. Gwen assists in filing the paperwork. Jack smooths the child's fair hair while he sleeps in a playpen, points out that it has a coppery sheen to it, and begins to call the baby Ginger. It sticks.

Shortly after Ginger is named, he turns invisible. Owen leaves a bottle of camouflage spray on his desk; it gets knocked over and rolls under his desk when Gwen is rummaging around looking for her missing earrings, and before Ianto has a chance to tidy up and put it right, Ginger crawls over and sticks the spout in his mouth.

He over-camouflages, or hypercamouflages, as Jack calls it, and Ianto is forced to mind him for a weekend using a life-signs monitor, searching for him when he's crawled out of his playpen. The team hears random giggles echo from different corners of the Hub. Owen's in favor of tying Ginger to Jack's conference table with a long piece of ribbon, but Gwen objects, worrying that Ginger could wrap the ribbon around his own neck strangle at any point and no one would know until Ianto's monitor stopped blipping.

The camouflage spray fortunately wears off after three days, and Owen finds no evidence of any lasting ill effects, though Owen continues to avoid Jack, and probably with good reason.

**

Something goes down between Owen and Jack. Owen has been twitchy for a while. He doesn't understand why Jack has seemingly abandoned the general operations of Torchwood Three in favor of spending his time bouncing Ginger on his knee and feeding Ginger smashed up cups of bananas. The others perhaps wonder the same thing, but Schuldig doesn't give a damn about what Torchwood Three does or does not do, and Gwen and Toshiko are more taken with the baby than Owen is. They are eating lunch in the conference room one Friday and Jack steps out to tend to Ginger, since the baby has just woken up from his nap. Gwen shares her theory that Ginger is Jack's son.

"Why else would any woman leave a baby on the doorstep of a travel agency?" Gwen theorizes.

It hardly takes much deduction to wonder if Ginger is Jack's child, and Ianto and Owen dismissed the question several weeks earlier by doing a paternity test on blood samples Owen had from each of them.

Schuldig is the one who responds to Gwen's theory, however. "They're not even the same species," he scoffs.

Owen leans in, interested. "You can tell what species a being is by reading their thoughts?"

Schuldig grins meanly and sidesteps Owen's question, "You can tell it from a blood test, and I can tell it from your thoughts."

Owen turns his face away in disgust.

"No secrets, Doctor Harper," Schuldig sing-songs, "Shall I tell them about the time with the--"

"Schuldig!" Toshiko scolds. Toshiko is perpetually horrified by the way Schuldig considers no one's thoughts to be sacred. Gwen looks torn between utter curiosity and disapproval. Ianto has no such compunctions, but he also has discretion, and makes a mental note to ask Schuldig later.

Schuldig hears his mental note, and looks over with a lascivious smirk. Ianto returns his gaze calmly.

Even if Ginger were Jack's son, Ianto suspects that fatherhood is still not a reason that would justify Jack's neglect of duty in Owen's eyes. Owen wants to perform research on the rift, and he chafes that Jack has categorically forbidden it. Jack asked Ianto to place certain notifiers on Owen's computer, so Jack is pinged when Owen begins reading some files Jack has told him to forget. Jack comes down from his office and hands an unusually solemn Ginger to Ianto. Ginger sucks on two of his own fingers and watches Jack as Jack turns off the cameras in the basement of the Hub. "He needs supper at five," Jack tells Ianto, and Ianto nods. That's three hours off.

"Owen, join me in the basement," Jack commands, and Owen frowns, but follows Jack's gesture and precedes him to the lower level. Jack lingers a moment to bend in close to Schuldig and whisper something, and then he echoes Owen's steps down the tunnel. The door closes heavily behind them.

Neither Jack nor Owen talk about what transpires between them. Jack emerges in time to ask Ianto about leftovers from supper and sing Ginger to sleep. Owen doesn't come up--that Ianto sees--until the next morning. Owen has bloodshot eyes, doesn't ask about experimenting with the rift any longer, and calls Jack "Sir" without a trace of sarcasm. Jack lets Ianto know that Owen won't be doing fieldwork for a while, and Owen seems fine with it.

One night, when he still has his hands splayed against the soundproofing panels he installed in Schuldig's quarters and is resting his head against the wall and breathing heavily, Ianto asks Schuldig what happened between Jack and Owen. The post-coital afterglow is always the best time to get actual answers from Schuldig. Ianto doesn't fool himself that it's out of any kind of affection. He's read all the materials he and Owen can find about telepathy--the hormones and single-minded focus of mutual orgasm are probably the most relaxation a telepath ever experiences.

Schuldig is lighting a cigarette and pauses with the lighter held to his mouth but not lit yet. "Are you sure you want to know?" he questions. Ianto refastens his trousers and turns around, still leaning against the wall to catch his breath. Schuldig always asks that when Ianto asks him something, and Ianto thinks Schuldig only does it to see Ianto pause. Ianto doesn't hesitate this time, though, and nods.

His head fills with a jumble of Owen's memories--Jack looking severe, face implacable and arms folded over his chest; the pattern of the cobblestone floor in the basement, a crack in one of the tiles on the wall. It keeps coming back to Jack's face. There are words looping through Owen's memory, but they're distorted and Ianto can't make any sense of all of it.

"But what happened," he presses Schuldig. Schuldig takes a drag off his cigarette, releases the air in deep breath, and then meets Ianto's eyes and shrugs.

"Thoughts, memories," Schuldig says, "They're not always about what happened." He takes another drag and watches disinterestedly as Ianto buckles his belt. Ianto thinks rather pointedly at Schuldig that Schuldig is lying to him, but Schuldig remains unprovoked, which is perhaps a sign that he is telling the truth.

Ianto is on his way out the door when Schuldig volunteers more information. Ianto pauses in the doorway to listen but does not turn around. "Jack--" Schuldig says, "Most people's memories about him are like that." And Ianto walks upstairs to the sound of Schuldig's laughter in his head and to a replay of his own memories, a fast-forwarded jumble of all the times he hated Jack with the most intense passion he can imagine intermixed with the times he let Jack push him to his knees.

**


	2. Chapter 2

Several weeks later, Ianto is called into Jack's office. He sucks in a quick startled breath at seeing Ronon leaning forward with his forearms resting on his knees in the chair across from Jack's desk.

"Sir, do you need--"

"Sit." Jack says, nodding toward another chair, and it's not an invitation. Ianto obeys. Ronon looks over once, giving Ianto a curious once-over but no smile. Ianto's chest clenches for a moment, and he suddenly wonders if Ronon has been retconned. He's forgotten to check the inventory recently.

"Why do you want to join Torchwood?" Jack asks Ronon, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms.

Ronon has a slightly amused expression on his face, and he looks over briefly at Ianto and Ianto knows that he hasn't been retconnned. "I'm good at hunting aliens."

Jack sits up in his chair. "You're not from Earth--" Ronon doesn't disagree, though he's never said where he is from "--and you strike me as the kind of guy who works well on his own." Jack pauses for emphasis and repeats his question. "Why do you want to join Torchwood?"

Ronon looks down at the floor as he pulls his words together. "I worked on my own for a long time. Then I got used to being part of a team."

"What happened to your team?" Jack asks fiercely, and his tone makes Ronon look up sharply to look Jack in the eye.

"They're dead," Ronon says gruffly. Jack looks over at Ianto and raises his eyebrows pointedly, as if to say, "See, that's why he shouldn't be let in."

"How many teams have you had?" Ronon asks Jack suddenly, and for a second Ianto is afraid Jack's going to shoot him.

**

Ronon is added to the Torchwood Three staff roster, though not to the driving rota, at least not until he has a license. (Schuldig has a license, but also a tendency to swerve wildly if someone in a passing vehicle thinks anything shocking, so he was taken off the rota in his second week.) Ianto is put in charge of helping Ronon acclimate to Earth and Cardiff. He checks to make sure Ronon is literate, and then gives him the requisite three introductory binders. The binders are carbon copies--faded purple on yellowed paper. There are notes in the margins in blue ink in what looks suspiciously like Jack's script. Ianto wonders if he should expect more aliens in the near future, in which case it might be worth updating the materials--they regard the telephone as a new-fangled contraption.

He adds in some information of his own for Ronon's benefit. A tour of the market, details of how the locks and power system works at the Hub, a map of Cardiff that includes the sewers.

**

Ianto is minding the baby and trying to fix the control panel for the Hub's fire-control system. Sprinklers have been randomly going off in Schuldig's room, and Owen is the prime suspect but no one has been able to prove anything or control the water. The whole system was set up by one of Torchwood Three's earliest members, a man named Peterson, and Ianto has the distinct impression from the remnants of Peterson's work that the man's enthusiasm outweighed his competence.

Ginger grows bored of the wooden rattle Ianto brought down with them in the first five minutes of Ianto's work, and topples himself over from where he is sitting propped against Ianto's leg to scoot closer to Ianto's work and reach for the green handle next to the blue switch.

Ianto puts down his screwdriver and lifts Ginger up to move him safely away from the panel again. He gives Ginger back the rattle. Ginger throws the rattle back at him, staring straight at the green handle and seemingly trying to hit it with the toy. Ianto has reached his hand up to his ear and is about to call someone from upstairs to come fetch the baby when he thinks--Not a baby--and instead of trying to block Ginger from reaching the panel he pulls Ginger onto his lap and reaches for the green handle. Ianto pauses with his hand on the green handle and looks at Ginger, who smiles and waves his hands excitedly in an attempt at clapping. Ianto takes this as an affirmative and pulls the green handle.

Ginger chortles on Ianto's lap and then reaches toward the panel. Ianto obligingly holds the baby closer, and Ginger pushes the green handle up again and then presses down all of the red switches.

Ianto calls Toshiko on his radio. "Could you run a system diagnostic and see if the irregularity in the trigger is still there?"

"Oi!" Owen interrupts. "You should get up here!" It's his "or you'll miss supper" tone and not his "we're under attack by strange fish-creatures" tone, so Ianto puts his screwdriver away in the tool kit, grabs Ginger's discarded toy, and carries the baby back upstairs.

Owen is playing the footage over in a loop, and even Ronon is laughing at it. Ianto is impressed--somehow Ginger managed to find the exact sprinkler that would soak the captain sitting at his desk and yet not destroy the paperwork cluttering the desk surface.

"Ianto!" Jack bellows, and Ianto straightens up from looking at the computer to face the soaked captain.

"Sir?"

"This is fixing the sprinklers?"

Ianto suppresses a smirk. "I apologize, sir."

"The problem was in Schuldig's quarters!"

"Yes," Ianto ducks his head, as much to hide his smile as to appear contrite, "I'm afraid I wasn't careful and let Ginger too close to the control panel."

Jack seems to mellow at this, and tilts his head to regard Ginger curiously. Ginger laughs out loud, delighted by the attention.

"Maybe I underestimated the bugger," Owen mutters.

Jack comes close to Ianto and the baby and shakes his head violently, showering Ianto and the baby with droplets of water. Ianto closes his eyes; Ginger looks away and screws up his face. Jack just leans in to blow raspberries on the baby's cheek, which makes Ginger shriek with laughter.

Ianto looks on fondly until Jack leans in to blow raspberries on his cheek as well. "Sir!" Ianto protests the indignity, taking several steps back and colliding with Ronon, who doesn't seem shaken.

Ginger is holding his arms out now, demanding, so Jack takes him from Ianto and Ginger doesn't even seem to mind getting wet.

Toshiko reports that the irregularity in the sprinkler system seems to be fixed now. They don't have any further problems with it.

**

Toshiko and George become engaged, which surprises everyone at Torchwood 3. They've been seeing each other for less than a year. Previously, Tosh would have been the first one to say that her work left no time for personal relationships, but apparently George spends about as much time lost in his own thoughts as Tosh does at work, and they've found a way to make it work. She glows with happiness when she shyly shows off her engagement ring and holds Ginger in her lap with a wistful look in her eye.

Gwen seems particularly shocked, confirming Jack's theory that she's the only one of them left who even has emotions any longer. She and Rhys are still a couple but sometimes she and Owen arrive to the Hub together. They're more discreet than they were previously and Ianto doesn't think that Jack has noticed yet.

Ronon doesn't appear to be seeing anyone, even though Ianto dutifully went over Earth courtship rituals as part of the required Torchwood alien orientation checklist. Ronon watches Ianto sharply, sometimes, and one time Ianto blushes on his way out of Schuldig's room and Ronon's eyes narrow.

Ianto himself is annoyed by his own inability to stop sleeping with the captain. Jack presumes intimacy with everyone, always standing too close, letting his hands stray too low when he brushes by someone. He's been distracted by the baby for some time and not sleeping with anyone, at least as far as Ianto knows, though Gwen had been staying over for a few nights before she and Rhys got back together.

But when Jack's in a good mood one evening and literally waltzes into the staff kitchen, Ianto finds his resolve weak. Jack is humming to himself and grins when he sees Ianto washing mugs in the sink. He takes Ianto's sudsy hands and wraps one arm around his waist and tries to dance Ianto around the room to the music that is only in Jack's head. Ianto blinks and tries not to step on Jack's shoes.

"I love you in rubber gloves and an apron," Jack says warmly, pulling Ianto in closer.

"I've always found the lemon-scented dish soap the most appealing myself." Ianto tries not to fall over when Jack laughs and tips Ianto back over his arm. Ianto instinctively tries to grab a closer hold on Jack's shoulders, but his hands are slippery and they slide, and he has to trust Jack to raise him up again.

Jack does, and maneuvers them both up against the counter, pressing up against Ianto and wrapping a hand around the back of Ianto's neck to pull him in for a kiss.

Ianto feels Jack's lip brush against his cheek softly. "I think I hear the baby crying," Ianto says.

Jack licks a line along Ianto's jaw. "I don't," Jack says.

"You should check on him," Ianto insists, pushing at Jack's waist ineffectually with his gloved hands.

Jack pauses for a last breath before capturing Ianto's lips more firmly, and Ianto parts his own helplessly at the pressure of Jack's tongue. "He'll be fine," Jack pulls away to say, and Ianto loses track of what Jack was talking about.

"My mother warned me about men like you," Ianto mutters, half to himself.

Jack just smiles against his lips. "I would have thought you'd be the kind of boy to listen to your mother."

Ianto can sneer and dismiss Jack's ridiculous stories about his sexual prowess, but Jack's genuine joy is harder to ignore. Jack gets him again early one morning, when Schuldig is undoubtedly still snoring away in his quarters, Ronon is off on his early morning run, and Jack and Ianto and Ginger are the only awake ones in the Hub. Jack is swinging the baby around through the air, spinning around in circles with his arms outstretched so that Ginger seems like he is flying. He loves it, and when Jack stops, a little out of breath and catching Ginger up in his arms, Ginger grins and claps excitedly, trying to cheer Jack on to do it again.

"Ianto!" Jack greets him. "Come fly with us," he invites, and Ianto isn't sure what he means by that, exactly, but his footsteps carry him over to where Jack and Ginger are playing regardless. Jack has taught Ginger how to rub noses, a practice which Ginger has embraced with great enthusiasm, so when Ianto approaches he has to lean in close to the baby and allow Ginger to smear their faces together. Jack thinks it's hilarious, of course, but Jack also thought it was hilarious when half the team got alien hives and they all had to spread oil over each other to bring the swelling down. To be fair, it was the oil-spreading and not the purple itchy spots that Jack found so amusing, but he had still been the only one laughing.

Jack balances Ginger in his left arm and uses his right hand to cup around Ianto's neck and drag Ianto in for their own form of face smearing, which involves significantly more tongue than Ginger's did. When Jack is smiling and domestic Ianto finds it the hardest to turn away--it's as though Jack's happiness doesn't bear reproach, it shines over Ianto. Jack deepens the kiss, but Ianto pulls back after a moment. Ginger is staring at them with a solemn expression and Ianto finds it rather disconcerting.

"Sir, the baby is watching us."

"Oh, he's a voyeur, all right," Jack says, giving Ginger a little pat on the behind.

Ianto eyes Ginger suspiciously, but Gwen arrives at the Hub and Jack puts Ginger in his high chair and asks Gwen to feed him breakfast. Jack sneaks back to Ianto and takes his hand to tug him off to the bedroom. Ianto is distracted from turning Jack down by the way Ginger is still staring at him, and by the time Jack has Ianto in his room it's hopeless.

Ianto may be helpless in the moment but he broods about it later. He and Schuldig were teaching Ronon how to play poker; Schuldig was cheating so it was all pointless and eventually they ended up polishing weapons instead.

Schuldig gripes that Ianto's pouting about Jack is boring, and enacts, in a poor falsetto, his impression of a swooning virgin trying to escape Jack's clutches. Ronon just looks across the table and raises an eyebrow at Ianto. Ianto decides that it's time to start serving drinks and heads over to the sideboard to take out three tumblers.

"Fuck him," Schuldig says. Ronon looks slightly surprised at this blatant display of insubordination. "You should just get rid of him and take over."

Ronon considers the idea; Ianto pours scotch.

"You'd be a better leader than he is," Ronon says seriously. Ianto hands him a glass.

"But he'd be much poorer at picking up after everyone," Ianto says dismissively.

"We'll be on your side," Schuldig promises.

"Perhaps," Ianto says warily. "Until I organized the whole place and you tired of writing actual mission reports instead of feeding the forms to the pterodactyl."

"She eats paper?" Ronon says interestedly.

Jack has started to send Ronon and Schuldig out on separate missions. He's started more sending of teams on missions in general, and less leading from the front lines. Ianto assumes that it has to do with the baby.

Ronon and Schuldig's missions mysteriously have no reports. Ianto raised a question about this with Jack, who promised to take care of it but didn't seem particularly concerned about following through. Ianto suspects that Jack has no interest in anyone else knowing what Schuldig and Ronon are doing that causes them to come back to the Hub early in the morning covered in blood that seems human.

Ianto gives the two of them a hard time about not filing their paperwork but once he's let Jack know he doesn't think about it again until Toshiko discovers an intelligence file about Schuldig.

It may have been wiser to share her concerns with Jack in private, but Tosh confronts all of them in the middle of the Hub while Ianto is serving the mid-morning round of coffee. "He used to be an assassin!" she shouts, flinging her paper evidence furiously at Jack. "He was a killer--"

"Not was, am," Schuldig corrects, smirking.

"What?" Toshiko says, derailed by his interruption.

"Isn't that what we do here?" Schuldig says, drawing it out as though this point should be obvious. "Kill things?" Ronon looks like he agrees with Schuldig, and Ianto notes that as interesting.

Toshiko looks appalled. "We are defending people from things they can't possibly hope to understand!"

Schuldig scoffs derisively, and Tosh is close to hysterical tears. Jack glares at Schuldig and Schuldig retreats to his quarters, smirking. Ronon follows him, looking curious, and Ianto wishes that he'd wired Schuldig's quarters for sound, because he is very curious about what the two of them are going to be discussing. Jack wraps an arm around Tosh's shoulder and pulls her into his office, but Tosh does not look comforted.

Jack calls Ianto in later, after Tosh has left. "Make this disappear," he says, gesturing to all the papers Tosh has left on his desk. Ianto doesn't think Jack just means to clear the desk surface.

"Sir?"

"All of it," Jack says. "I don't want this information out there." The fact Toshiko can find something out after months of searching hardly seems to qualify as the information being "out there" but Jack does not appear in the mood for semantic arguments.

"So we are murderers now, then?" Ianto can't stop himself from asking. Jack looks up at him sharply.

"Is that what you think?"

"That's what Toshiko thinks."

"I asked what you think." Jack's voice is hard.

Ianto is silent.

"Maybe you should think more for yourself," Jack says cuttingly, taking his coat off the hook and shrugging it over his shoulders.

"You confuse sentimentality with sensitivity," Ianto returns, but Jack doesn't meet his eyes as he brushes past Ianto out of his office.

"Make those files disappear," he reiterates, and Ianto does. Of course he reads them first.

**

It's not clear at the time, but Toshiko does not last long after that. They return to work the following day, everyone in a tentative truce of pointedly not talking about anything besides coffee and the weather. Schuldig spends a great deal of time getting high in his quarters; Jack lets him.

Owen and Toshiko put the finishing touches on a project they've been working on for years and had essentially finished months ago, adapting a piece of alien tech scavenged from a crash site into a weevil translator. They test it on Janet and her lowing is apparently stylized odes of mourning. Tosh thinks it's a flaw in the translator, but Owen thinks its correct. He pesters Schuldig to help try to communicate with the weevils they currently have in the cells. Schuldig insists he can't read anything off of them, but Owen clearly doesn't believe him. Schuldig's ensuing attempt to bargain with Owen, offering weevil translations in exchange for some manufactured heroin, cast suspicion on his denial. Owen and Tosh bond a bit over their mutual distrust.

The strangest thing is that all the weevils recite the same poetry. Owen thinks they have a communal memory.

Ianto reads the weevil poetry and it reminds him of something. He can't place it right away and scans a dozen books in the Torchwood library trying to place where he's seen this before. He thinks at first maybe Dickinson, or some of the apocalyptic material he was reading pre-Abbadon.

He doesn't recall where he's seen it before until his eyes fall on the copy of George's book Gwen still has sitting on her desk. Tosh had given each of them a copy when he had first published--they were probably the only seven copies that sold. Ianto digs his own copy off his shelf and begins highlighting and flagging matching passages. It soon becomes clear that George is either psychically linked with a weevil or plagiarizing weevil work and either way Jack is suspicious. When Jack confiscates the research materials Tosh was keeping (without permission, Jack emphasizes) at her flat, George's career plummets almost immediately, and the fiasco contributes to the breaking of their engagement.

It isn't exactly Torchwood that breaks Tosh in the end, perhaps, but it is all the other things that don't fit in around it--the dust that floats in its wake, Ianto quotes to himself.

There are moments when Ianto himself falls apart, and he doesn't even need to be locked in a wire cage with a weevil to have them. He can just be walking though the hallway, or sitting at the reception desk in the office, and suddenly it flashes upon him with horror--what if this is it? What if death is really the end? Worse, what if death is only the beginning, and the present is only a glimmer of light before an eternity of shapes hunting in the darkness? But he pulls himself together again, pushes the thoughts down and suppresses them with iron will. He's with Jack once when it happens. They're both collapsed on the Hub couch in stages of partial undress and it strikes Ianto, the terror. Jack can sense it, somehow, and he pulls Ianto onto his lap, wraps an arm around his neck and runs a finger along Ianto's lip, all in a way that ought to be awkward but Jack manages to make natural and comforting.

Jack is always there when you most need him, Ianto realizes. The problem is simply that the time when you second-most need Jack he may not be there, and while that time is happening it feels a great deal like the time you most need him. It is only with retrospective distance that you can see when you were strong enough to survive on your own and when you truly would have fallen.

Toshiko dies in a traffic accident.

George comes to the funeral service and Jack growls at him menacingly but he's really too pathetic to even bother intimidating, his weevil-enhanced success already chemically forgotten, along with, presumably, half of his memories of Tosh herself.

Jack lingers near the grave in the rain, and Ianto waits for him, holding the umbrella.

"When you do me, don't be halfhearted," Ianto says suddenly, thinking about George and his incomplete memories of his former fiancee, and thinking about himself and waking up on the floor of the Torchwood storeroom.

Jack looks at him sharply, shaken from whatever else he was contemplating.

"When..." Ianto struggles with how to put it delicately. "When it's time for me to forget, I don't want to remember any of it." He swallows. "Please," he says, staring down at Toshiko's empty grave. Her body is frozen in Torchwood's vault; her family given the comfort of an empty coffin.

Either Jack is crying or a raindrop has landed on his face.

"And if it's not too much trouble," Ianto continues, looking up now at the grey of the sky, "I'd like to have lived a quiet life in a small flat over a bookstore. Maybe in Bristol."

They are standing close, sharing the same black umbrella. Jack turns to face Ianto. "There's nothing you'd care to remember?" he says, and his voice is lacking the usual sexual innuendo that would accompany Jack making that statement.

Ianto swallows hard, and blinks. Jack has taken a step even closer to Ianto under the umbrella and the sky filled with rain. "Do you know what they used to do before there was retcon?" Jack asks. Ianto shakes his head quickly, a reflexive answer to a question from his superior more than anything else. "They called them 'erasers,'" Jack says harshly, and his eyes are far away. "And they were--are--these tiny metal implements. Look like screwdrivers. They drive them through your skull to put an electrical impulse directly into the brain matter. Nothing as delicate as a carefully measured dose of amnesia pill. They wipe away years, decades, indiscriminately, and only leave pain, the worst sensation you can imagine. There's not usually time to anesthetize someone before you need them to forget, you see," Jack is speaking almost conversationally now. "And so the memories are gone and left in their wake is the sensation of a hole in the head and your brain on fire." He pauses.

Ianto wonders who 'they' is. "There aren't any records of anything like that at Torchwood One," Ianto says.

Jack scoffs. "There are things even Yvonne Hartman wouldn't do." He continues with a musing tone. "Retcon is fucking merciful."

They look at each other for a moment, and Ianto swallows heavily.

Then Jack steps away and out into the rain, dashing over the slick grass back toward the car.

**

Jack seems to take Toshiko's death hard, but that's his way--he mourns people intensely but quickly, Ianto has observed. Ginger seems tuned in to Jack's grief, and spends an inordinate amount of time simply sitting on Jack's lap, patting his face occasionally with chubby fingers. After a sad time, Jack is angry for a phase, and much of his ire focuses on Gwen. Ianto is beginning to see through Jack more clearly, and he suspects that Jack blames himself for Toshiko's slow scattering to pieces and that Jack worries that the same thing will happen to Gwen, who is weak in the same way. Perhaps all women are like that. Lecturing Gwen on how to handle her personal life is perhaps not the most logical nor the most effective way to strengthen her, but Jack is blind about such things. Jack likes to be needed, which attracts him to incomplete people, but Torchwood would chip away at even the strongest souls.

Jack treats people differently, which made him difficult to understand at first. He is soft with Gwen and Ianto most of the time, but hard with Owen and impatient and controlling with Schuldig and Ronon. Ianto is not sure how he is with the baby--there don't seem to be the right words. Jack sees Schuldig as more of a tool than a person, Ianto is coming to realize, and he saw Ronon that way at first, but is changing his perspective, and Ianto thinks it possibly has to do with the way Jack has been watching repeats of Ianto and Ronon together on CCTV. Soon Jack will make a move on Ronon himself, and that will determine the future of their relationship. Ianto thinks perhaps he should share this insight with Ronon, but he suspects that somehow Ronon already knows, and knows also how he will react, and is simply waiting for the captain.

Owen goes back on field duty.

There are more training classes at the Hub. Jack decides they all need to understand navigational equations in relation to fixing and using some equipment they've found on the eleventh level. Jack is a better instructor of physical things, because when he tries to teach higher calculus he still attempts to use his hips and shoulders and it is not particularly successful. Gwen yawns obviously, Schuldig was excused because he was more distracting than he was helpful, and Ronon is the only one who makes any kind of reasonable progress. Ianto resentfully thinks that Ronon must have studied this before, and then he sees that the baby is feeding Ronon answers, holding up fingers and Ronon is merely counting them. Ianto begins taking his answers from Ginger as well, who sits in the corner of the conference room as Jack is "teaching." It takes Jack half a day to catch on to their cheating; Gwen seems very impressed with their progress. They don't share the joke with her until Jack catches sight of Ginger holding up six fingers out of the corner of his eye.

Ianto attempts to argue that there is no need for the rest of them to learn navigational equations if they already have one Torchwood Three member who can do them proficiently. Jack looks surprised at calling Ginger a Torchwood member, but concedes the point.

Ianto finds a new room full of books down on the eleventh level as well, and he begins to categorize them and scan them into the computer's database. He works long days. Everyone spends more time in the Hub; Owen working harder with his new seriousness and dedication, Gwen reluctant to confront her problems with Rhys and clinging desperately to Jack. Ronon and Schuldig are living there, which makes Ianto more inclined to take his meals there and often stay the night. He dwells on the idea of memory a great deal. He pokes at the remnants of his memory of being retconned cautiously, half curious about what he does not recall and half terrified that if he probes the wound too deeply he'll actually trigger the return of the memories.

He reflects too frequently, and accidentally arouses Schuldig's curiousity. Schuldig, of course, has no concerns about actually triggering the return of Ianto's memories, and a great deal of curiosity about what is so interesting it had to be hidden. They come back to Ianto in the middle of the night on Ronon's bed, where he collapsed, sweaty, between Schuldig and Ronon. Schuldig is awake, and when Ianto jerks awake, sweating again, Schuldig's green eyes glitter at him in the darkness.

Ianto clutches the bedsheet up to cover his chest in a unusually prude gesture, and Schuldig just smirks.

Ianto crawls out of bed without being careful, and Ronon stirs and rolls onto his back. "What's going on?" Ianto gathers his clothes up in his arms but doesn't bother to put them on and walks naked across the Hub.

Jack is standing over Ginger's crib in his office, but Ginger is sleeping soundly, and when Jack spots Ianto he leads him down to his bedroom without asking any questions. Even once they are below, Jack doesn't ask, and Ianto doesn't offer. Jack is dressed, but he stretches out on the bed and pulls Ianto down next to him, spreading a blanket over Ianto's body and tucking it securely around him as though Ianto were Ginger going down for a nap.

Ianto shivers as the blankets warm to his body heat and as he relives the memories a second time. Jack rubs his back reassuringly.

"I thought it was you," Ianto admits.

"What?"

"The amnesia pill I took," Ianto's voice trembles a little, "I thought you gave it to me without my knowledge." Instead, Ianto remembers his own shaky fingers searching through the storeroom, desperate to forget, unable to go on.

"Oh, Ianto," Jack says, and Ianto takes comfort in the sympathy in Jack's voice and the warmth of his body.

Ianto has almost drifted off to sleep for the second time that night when Jack speaks again. "It was me."

Ianto hears Jack's voice but it takes him a minute to rouse and truly understand the words. "Sir?"

Jack hesitates a moment and Ianto lifts his head off Jack's chest to look at his face. Jack stares at the ceiling. "Not that time," Jack clarifies. "But there were other times."

"I don't understand," Ianto says.

Jack pushes Ianto's head back down on his shoulder. "I don't think you remember anything about them. But...I may be the monster you think I am, Ianto."

Ianto can feel the press of Jack's lips on the top of his head.

"How many times?" Ianto asks.

Jack is silent for a long time, and Ianto thinks that he is not going to answer, or that perhaps he has fallen asleep mid-conversation. "Four," Jack says finally.

Schuldig could probably restore those memories to Ianto as easily as he did the other. That thought makes Ianto shiver again, and he snuggles in closer to Jack. Ianto finds it strangely reassuring that when Jack took memories from him Ianto had no idea it had ever happened. The horror of the first person Lisa killed is all too clear now in his memory--Doctor Tanazaki wasn't the first foreign specialist Ianto had tried to bring in to help her, and Doctor Shanalan's death had been just as gruesome. Ianto remembers clearly the desperation he felt afterward, sick in the knowledge that there was no way he could go on with Lisa the way he had after she had killed the doctor and yet having no way to do anything else. He'd lit on the idea of retcon with panicky desperation, and had repeated to himself over and over and he searched for the drug, "No doctors, no doctors, no doctors." Of course he had forgotten that as well as everything else about the experience, and had thus been doomed to repeat his own mistake, without the mercy of forgetting it the second time. He feels tears forming in his eyes and one overflows in a track down his face. Jack presumably feels it as well, and smooths a hand over Ianto's hair as further comfort as Ianto finally falls asleep.

Ianto is wary of Schuldig for a while afterward. He knows intellectually that Schuldig's telepathic range can extend far beyond the physical parameters of the Hub, and thus that evading the man with the hope that this will protect his thoughts is futile, but he tries it anyway, shying away from Schuldig's quarters, from the weapons room where he spars with Ronon, and staying close to Jack, who can warn Schuldig off with a glance when he is feeling protective.

Jack is feeling protective.

Jack tries to coax Ianto to play with Ginger a great deal. It is not so much that Ginger needs amusement as that Jack is trying to knit the three of them into a strange little family. Ianto understands that he is playing the role of the wife and tries to decide how he feels about that. On one level he feels offended--he could have an entire family of his own--is planning to, in fact--his own children, a house, mortgage, all of it. But his offense feels slightly forced, as though he feels he should feel offended and thus does, and not that deep down he objects to the situation.

One advantage to carrying Ginger around all the time is that it acts as a Schuldig repellant. Ginger has always freaked Schuldig out.

Ianto sits on the floor in Jack's office with Ginger one evening, making a tower out of blocks. Ianto hands each of the blocks to Ginger one by one. Ginger won't take the block until Ianto reads the letter on the side aloud and makes the noise of the animal pictured on the other side of the block. Then Ginger meticulously places the block on his tower, which is leaning precariously but does not fall. Ianto notices that there is a giraffe coming up three blocks ahead and wonders whether his odds are better at faking a giraffe noise--Ginger will object if his impression is half-hearted--or at trying to pull another block out of order.

Concentrating on avoiding the giraffe, Ianto only realizes how much Ginger's towers resemble Canary Wharf right as Ginger knocks over all of the blocks in a gleeful fit of destruction. Ginger laughs madly, but Ianto is pulled back in time, and he shivers.

Jack comes in, and tousles Ginger's hair with one hand while holding out a drink to Ianto with the other. Ianto thanks Jack with a nod, and Jack holds up his own glass and clinks them together.

"Cheers," Ianto says automatically.

Ginger begins stacking his blocks again. Ianto raises himself off the floor to lean against the edge of Jack's desk, settling next to Jack himself.

"Do you have children, sir?" Ianto asks, taking a sip. When he first learned of retcon he was suspicious every time the captain poured him a drink or showed up out of nowhere with some food. Either time has inured him to the danger or he trusts Jack now. Or perhaps he simply cares less; experience has taught him that there are far more frightening things in life than forgetting one man's life.

"Do I seem like the kind of guy who has children?" Jack laughs, and Ianto notes that that is not a real answer but doesn't push any further, smiling gently. "What about you, Ianto? Are you a family man?"

Ianto takes another swallow. "I suppose so," he answers after a moment. "I've always thought that I would want all the usual things, you know. Family, house, dog, garden."

"You're young," Jack says, running his thumbs along his braces musingly. "You'll have all those yet. You just have to get out more. Woo some pretty girls!"

Ianto laughs politely again in response to Jack's grin, but he thinks about how ridiculous this entire conversation is. They both realize how preposterous it is and yet they play it out anyway, each saying their own lines, and Ianto, who usually appreciates having a line to say, is abruptly sick of it, and sets his glass down behind him on Jack's desk. He wraps a hand around the back of Jack's neck and pulls Jack in toward himself. Jack seems just as relieved to be done with the conversational facade and kisses him deeply.

Everyone else Ianto has ever kissed, kissing has been about sex. He'd rarely kissed any of the other men; maybe briefly as a prelude to unfastening their trousers and getting a hand down their pants. Schuldig doesn't care for kissing and is always anxious to get on with things, and Ronon likes to use his mouth but he prefers other places over Ianto's lips.

Ianto had kissed Lisa, had taken more time with just snogging and not trying to move any further, but it had still been about sex. She'd kissed him when she was feeling sexy, when she wanted him to play with her, and he had done the same. Kissing with Jack is often about other things, about comfort or reassurance or joy or pride or just a reminder than another person was there, a person you had a close enough bond with to claim this from him.

Jack and Ianto kiss, intimately but not sexually, until Ginger knocks over his second block creation of the evening with a clatter and Jack decides it's time for Ginger to go to bed. He hoists Ginger up into his arms to get him ready; Ianto hands over Ginger's pajamas from the wardrobe.

Ianto goes out to check the locks for the night, and Jack catches his hand first. "You'll stay, tonight?" Jack asks. It's unusual for him to ask; Jack rarely plans assignations, he makes do with whoever is around when the mood hits.

Ianto simply nods.

**


	3. Chapter 3

Jack is amazing in bed, of course. Ianto would have said, before he slept with him, that nothing could have lived up to the captain's boasting about his prowess, but he had to revise his thoughts on the matter after personal experience. Jack is considerate, and very focused on pleasuring Ianto, but he enjoys his own pleasure obviously, in a way that Ianto finds flattering. Jack generally has ideas about what they should do in bed, and Ianto generally agrees that they are clever ones. Occasionally he grows peevish and irritated with Jack's ideas, though they are rarely repetitive. But the one time that Ianto tied Jack up and gagged him there was plenty of evidence that Jack thought that was a fantastic idea. Ianto rather liked it, perhaps too well.

They are bantering in the bedroom one evening. Ginger had set a fire in the Hub earlier in the day and they had spent the rest of the day ventilating out smoke and clearing debris. At least the sprinkler system had worked correctly. Jack had given Ginger a stern talking-to and a time out in one of the cells--mostly to keep him out of the way as they cleaned up afterward--but he worries about whether it's the right thing.

"When I was a boy," Jack says, "if I'd set a fire in the house my father would have beaten me."

Ianto is beginning to secretly agree with Schuldig that Ginger is not a baby or a boy, and that controlling him is perhaps impossible. "Were you quite obedient, then?" Ianto asks. There's only the slightest edge in his voice, but Jack catches the look in his eye and pushes aside his questions about fatherhood.

"What do you think?" Jack asks throatily, sitting down on the edge of the bed.

Ianto pushes Jack backwards and kneels on the bed to straddle his waist. "I suspect," Ianto begins. Jack interrupts him by reaching down the front of his trousers, and Ianto gasps before continuing. "That you were a naughty boy." Jack is grinning in a naughty fashion now, but Ianto continues, smiling. "Disobedient. Causing trouble and making your mother cross. Irrepressible. Much like you are now."

"So basically you're saying that Ginger is exactly what I had coming to me."

"Precisely," Ianto agrees, gasping again as Jack does something particularly clever with his fingers.

"And I can't get any points off for bad behavior?" Jack says.

Ianto can hardly concentrate on what Jack is saying when what Jack is doing is so much more compelling. "I think you're confused about how the system works, sir."

Jack groans. "Say it again."

Ianto grins. "Beg," he says, unrepentant.

"Please," Jack says, and there is just enough desperation in his tone that Ianto concedes.

"Yes, sir," Ianto says, wrapping the syllables around his tongue prettily, and imbuing them with arch knowing but not with sarcasm, which would spoil it.

"Fuck," Jack says eloquently, his eyes slipping shut for a moment, and he rolls Ianto over on the bed and strips him of his remaining clothes.

**

Spring comes, finally. Ianto takes Ginger to the park, having always thought that underground was no place for a small child. He'd reproached Jack on the topic once and Jack had mentioned taking Ginger camping, so Ianto doesn't bring it up any longer. Ianto sits on a blanket and watches Ginger run in circles. Ronon sits next to him and eats gummy sour cola candies, for which he has developed quite a fondness. The plastic wrapping crinkles in his hand. He tries to feed one to Ianto with a crazy grin, and Ianto finally opens his mouth just so Ronon's sticky fingers won't get in his hair. Ginger eats some grass, and Ianto hopes it won't be bad for him and doesn't mention it to Jack.

Gwen bought Ginger some books to celebrate what she calls his birthday and what is actually the anniversary of the day he turned up on their doorstep. Children's stories turn out to be yet another bit of Earth culture that Jack is entirely ignorant of, like athletics. So Jack reads the stories to Ginger at bedtime and seems almost more enraptured than Ginger himself. He reads Ginger the story of Pinnochio one evening. Jack's voice recounts how the wooden boy turned real and Ianto spies him looking sentimental and melancholy afterward, still sitting with Ginger and the book on his lap, rocking slightly in the chair and staring at nothing. Ginger licks Jack's face in a way that looks like it is meant to be comforting, and it shakes Jack out of his daze and he laughs at the baby.

Ianto shakes his head and leaves his peephole at the doorway to go lock up the Hub; he's completely convinced that the two of them are both insane, and he only wonders what he's done that was so horrible to deserve them.

A case with a shapeshifter goes wrong and Jack, Gwen, and Ronon are arrested and charged with attempted murder. Ianto calls the prime minister, but she is out of contact on an African safari. Jack and Ronon have no records, citizenship papers, or visible ties to the community, and are remanded into custody. Gwen is released on bail. Ianto attempts to pull strings with the prime minister again. Rhys is appalled that Gwen has been arrested and seems to suspect that she is actually guilty. A dose of retcon disappears from the storeroom and Ianto doesn't say anything.

Ianto finally gives up on the prime minister and forges Owen some papers so he can act as their solicitor. Schuldig goes along with Owen and mind-whammies the magistrates. Having a telepath around, while generally a nuisance, has occasional advantages. It is fortunate that Schuldig is in a relatively cooperative mood when the other half of the team are arrested.

The confusion Schuldig wrecks upon the officials will only be temporary, so once he's back in the Hub Jack calls the prime minister himself to try to get everything sorted. Ianto hacks into records and deletes as much as he can. Jack rings Detective Swanson and tries to patch up relations with the local police. While they don't technically have any jurisdiction over Torchwood it's certainly clear that they could make life difficult. Jack seems to assume that Ianto will stay with Ginger while he goes to meet with the detective, and while Ianto does generally mind the baby when Jack has to leave the Hub on business this feels different. Jack dresses for the occasion as though he is taking a beautiful woman out to dinner.

It is as though the more formally Jack dresses the further back in time his fashion sense travels, and he dons a frock coat that looks like it dates from the turn of the century. Ianto would not be surprised if Jack pulled out a top hat and cane to match, but he does not, nor does he remove his computerized wristwatch. He futzes with his cravat in the mirror until Ianto smoothes it for him. He tries to kiss Ianto as he goes out the door but Ianto leans his face away and Jack gives a little sigh, instead. Jack's shoes clack against the pavements in the plass the same way they did against the tile floors in the Hub.

Ianto puts Ginger to sleep and checks the storeroom to see if there are any missing doses of amnesia pill. There aren't. Jack almost certainly has his own private supply.

Ianto begins filing a stack of old case reports at eleven that evening and acknowledges to himself that he is jealous. Despite having as recently as the previous week had sex with both Ronon and Schuldig, he feels as though Jack is being unfaithful. He is irritated that he feels this way. He and Jack have made no promises, no obligations, no acknowledgements. Jack is sexual by nature and frequently laughs at the "quaint idea of monogamy." Though Jack can be territorial he has accepted Ianto's ongoing affairs with Schuldig and Ronon without comment.

Time passes slowly that night. Ianto watches the hands on the clock and wonders if perhaps the clock requires oiling but refuses to let himself get out the stepstool.

Jack and Ianto do not have a relationship that tolerates quarreling, which is peculiar because somehow their relationship has already tolerated betrayal. Ianto is not sure if that is why they cannot quarrel, if after forgiving each other for endangering the planet and destroying the only hope that mattered, everything else is so petty as to be insignificant and not worth a second thought? Life does not feel that way, however, and Ianto suspects that the real reason they do not quarrel is because no matter who starts and what the subject, they will both be stubborn, and they will both lose. Neither of them can abide losing; though they both enjoy chess they only play other people in the Hub and never each other. Ianto gets most things he wants by doing them and no one stopping him. Jack gets things he wants by pleading or giving orders.

Ianto ponders what it is that he wants, precisely.

At two o'clock in the morning he tires of waiting. He packs up Ginger's travel bag and playpen. Ginger wakes when Ianto gathers him from the crib, but he immediately seems alert and thrilled about an adventure in the middle of the night. Ianto straps Ginger into the car seat in the SUV and Ginger claps his hands excitedly. Ginger likes leaving the Hub, though he doesn't often. Ianto worries that he hasn't left the Hub often enough, himself. He's become complacent, trapped in the Torchwood universe to the exclusion of everything else.

His flat isn't far. He carries Ginger inside and sets up the travel playpen, putting Ginger inside and handing over Ginger's favorite stuffed duck. He makes camomile tea in the kitchen and airs the bedding. He's been gone long enough for dust to settle on his quilt and bedshams, but they are easy enough to shake out. There is a picture of him with Lisa on the night table in an ornate silver frame his grandmother had once given him. He misses Lisa, suddenly, poignantly, in a way he hasn't in many months. Simply realizing that he hasn't thought of Lisa in so many days makes the pain worse, and his vision blurs with quiet tears before he falls asleep, closer to morning than to evening.

Ianto awakes only a few hours later to the sound of Jack and Ginger laughing together. He walks out of his bedroom in only his sleep pants, blinking. Jack must have been up all night, but he looks far more rested than Ianto, tickling Ginger's tummy and grinning broadly at Ianto's sleepiness.

"What are you doing here?" Ianto asks.

"I have a tracker on this little fella," Jack says, pointing at Ginger and tapping his wrist device. "Can't let him get away from me this time," Jack says, but Ianto is abruptly sick of it, wishing he had woken Ronon, given him a baby monitor and left Ginger at the Hub.

"Good," he says shortly. "You can take him back to the Hub with you. I'm not coming in today," he continues.

"What's wrong?" Jack asks, his attention finally centered on Ianto and not on the baby.

"Nothing." Ianto begins to make himself another cup of tea.

"Are you ill?" Jack is closer now, trying to press his wrist against Ianto's forehead, and Ianto wants none of it.

"I'm fine," he insists, batting Jack's hand away. "Tired," he says pointedly, and glares at Jack until Jack looks away.

Jack does take Ginger with him. Ianto does not drink the tea he has made, but returns to bed in the stifling quiet.

Jack has not let the matter rest, though, because that afternoon Ianto slowly arises from deep sleep to the sound of Owen insulting another one of the tenants in the stairway. Ianto's neighbor is insisting that no one lives in flat three any longer, it's been empty for months. Owen, after telling the neighbor to bugger off, is telling an elaborately concocted story about how Ianto still lives there but is desperately and contagiously ill, which is why he has summoned Owen, a doctor, to come by.

Mrs. Renton seems genuinely worried that Ianto's mysterious disease might be catching, but Owen seems to focus his attention on Ianto's door frame, banging on it and insisting that Ianto open up, since Owen knows he's in there.

Ianto answers the door, dressed but wrapped in his quilt. He wishes Mrs. Renton a good afternoon and assures her that he isn't ill, though she covers her mouth and nose with her hand upon seeing him and slowly backs away into her own flat. Owen pushes past him into flat three. Ianto gives up on Mrs. Renton and closes the door behind the two of them, taking the picture frame Owen has picked up to fiddle with and placing it back on his bookshelf.

"Why are you here?" Ianto asks tersely.

"Well," Owen says, moving over to the kitchen to poke at things in there, opening cupboards and drawers simply to stick his head inside. "Jack seems to think you're dying or something but you look fine to me. What happened, you tell him you have a headache?"

"I do have a headache," Ianto insists, but Owen doesn't listen. He's pressing the button on his earpiece. "What?" he says, not to Ianto but to whoever is talking back at the Hub.

Suddenly he grabs Ianto's arm, in an unusual panicky gesture. Ianto feels his heart freeze for a second in his chest before it resumes beating, faster.

"We have to go," Owen says, making eye contact with Ianto again.

Ianto nods, grabbing his keys and jacket. "What is it?"

"Not sure--some sort of time vortex--Jack and Ginger are caught--Gwen's freaked."

***

Jack and the baby are certainly caught in something--they're suspended in mid-air in a glowing circle of pulsing white light, rotating slowly. They appear awake--their eyes are open--but they do not focus on anything besides each other, as though they aren't aware of anything outside their own sphere. Ianto circles below them in the Hub, trying to puzzle out what is happening, and is struck suddenly by how symbolic it feels at the moment, Jack and Ginger facing each other and utterly absorbed; Ianto outside and looking in.

Owen and Gwen are arguing about where the power for the vortex is coming from when Ianto notices something peculiar. "Ginger is growing."

"Glowing?" Owen echoes. "No shit, mate, he's also floating. You want any more statements of the obvious?"

"Growing," Ianto emphasizes. "He's becoming larger. Watch him carefully, compare him to Jack, and you can see it."

Everyone is quiet for a minute as they focus. Watching Ginger grow is like watching clouds move. It's not apparent unless you concentrate and carefully establish a frame of reference, and then you can tell that he is gradually increasing in size. He's not simply expanding, though, he seems to be aging in a typical human pattern, slimming and lengthening into a schoolboy, rather than a toddler. They watch Jack closely at first as well, trying to ascertain if he is also getting larger and wondering if they will have a giant on their hands, but once Ianto realizes that Ginger is not enlarging so much as he is aging, Ianto begins to inspect Jack for signs of age on his face. He's not sure how old Jack is already to know how he would look in a year or two or five, and Jack does not appear any different, aside from the fact that he's glowing and in mid-air. It's difficult to be sure.

Once they realize that Ginger is growing Owen posits that the vortex is causing time to pass more quickly for the pair trapped inside it. Owen begins to worry how long their bodies can hold up under that kind of strain; Gwen attempts to convince Owen that Jack and Ginger are strong. She makes some ridiculously positive statement about how she's sure they can figure this out, and Ianto wishes that Tosh or Suzie were here. He would gladly trade insanity for some real expertise.

Gwen and Owen bicker a bit more while Owen tries to do some scans. Ianto does some scans of his own but if the resulting graphs mean anything significant it's beyond his understanding. Ronon tires of watching them type ineffectual commands into the Hub computers and jumps off a table and attempts to grab a leg and drag them out of the vortex. He manages to wave a hand through the lighted sphere but fails to touch either Ginger or Jack, and when he lands, he collapses to the floor, and Owen has to do a scan on him while bitching about how foolish Ronon is. Ronon is unconscious but comes round after a few minutes, wincing and clutching his head.

Hours pass and the hopeless desperation in the hub grows. Owen can't quite figure out what the vortex is doing to them, but he's convinced that it's killing them. Ianto shuts down the power in the wee hours of the morning as a last ditch effort, but still Jack and Ginger still float slowly in a funnel. Ianto and Ronon sit next to each other on the floor. Ianto leans against Ronon's shoulder exhaustedly. Gwen is crying but optimistic and delusionally convinced that Owen is going to figure something out; Owen started drinking several hours earlier. It's oddly symbolic, Ianto thinks, that Jack is glowing and floating above him, and Ianto is helpless on the ground, and Ianto keeps thinking he should pick up the shit that's been spread around as they've worked all night but he also has the sinking chorus in his head that the cleaning can wait until "after," and he doesn't let himself think about what after means.

Seventeen hours since Ianto left his flat, Ginger--now an almost unrecognizable young man--moves in the vortex. Not the vague floating motions that he and Jack have been sustaining. He deliberately raises his arms, seemingly in real time, and as he lowers them again the light in the vortex dims, ceases to rotate, and Jack and Ginger lower slowly to the floor.

Everyone stares for a long few minutes, and then Jack coughs and Gwen lets out a half sob and runs to him, half-collapsing in his arms as he half-collapses on her. They fall to the floor together, and this seems to catch Ginger's attention.

"She didn't mean to do it," he tells Jack, "but I fixed it." He doesn't seem to be referring to Gwen crying in Jack's lap.

Jack lets out a half-sob at that, and pushes himself up on one arm on the hub floor. Whatever he might have said back is lost, however, because Schuldig says, staring suspiciously at Ginger, "I knew that wasn't a baby."

***

Jack has developed, in less than seventeen hours, a streak of grey in his dark hair. He stares at himself in a mirror in his office and Ianto watches from across the Hub, wondering. He wonders what the sensations were like for Jack and Ginger within the vortex, how they experienced time. Have they been trapped, speechless and motionless, for thirteen years? Did they only experience the rush of a few seconds as they grew and raced through time? Was it seventeen hours for them as it was for Ianto?

Ianto doesn't ask. It feels as though time has passed to him. Because he was cool with Jack when it happened, and perhaps because it happened to Jack and Ginger together and not to Ianto, it feels as though they have grown several years apart. Ianto spies on Jack combing his hair in his office and feels a strange contradiction in his chest. At once he feels a dull grief, like he feels for Lisa, always there but not always sharp, sometimes fading to a backwash, and at the same time he feels the vividness of the memories he has with Jack--it was only four days ago that he fucked Jack bent over that table--he has only washed the table once since then--the clothes in his laundry hamper still smell of Jack's cologne--he has a note in his pocket with Jack's print on it, "The archives, 10 minutes"--Jack's office has a vestigial crib in it and Ianto makes up one of the guest rooms in the barracks for the young man who now introduces himself as the Doctor.

Ianto realizes that he wants the intimacy he had with Jack back very much. He isn't sure he does want it back, at first; Jack fusses over the Doctor and gripes about how the Doctor has given Jack grey hair the way Jack always said he would, and Jack watches Ianto with a little bit of sadness in his eyes but doesn't reach for him. Ianto is so surprised that he is able to stay out of Jack's embrace at first that he mistakes his own independence for lack of interest. It is only when he realizes that not needing the captain does not equate to not wanting him that Ianto follows Jack up to the roof. Jack is staring out at the horizon. If his eyesight is far better than Ianto's then perhaps he can even make out something in the distance.

"He left," Jack says.

"Ginger?" Ianto says, putting his hands in his trouser pockets. The wind is sharp on the roof and he's not wearing a coat the way Jack is.

Jack nods. "I knew he would."

Ianto squints into the light. "Will he be back?"

Jack sighs. "Probably. This time." But Jack has a worn look around his eyes that admits that even though Ginger will perhaps come back again this time, and maybe even the time after that, that he will not come back forever, and that Jack is not going with him again. Ianto steps closer to Jack and encourages Jack to wrap a warm arm around Ianto's shoulders, which Jack does willingly. "I think," Jack admits, "that for a little while I forgot that I wasn't really his father." They watch the city for a moment. "I didn't forget," Jack corrects himself. "But I wanted to."

Ianto can relate, and he nods once, sympathetically. He reaches one hand for Jack's and entwines their fingers together. Jack takes his gaze off of the city to regard their clasped hands. He squeezes Ianto's hand.

"You know everything is different now?" Jack says, and there's gravity and a hint of apprehension in his voice.

"You're a real boy now, sir," Ianto agrees, and he attempts to use the warmth in his voice and his smile to reassure Jack that they are on the same page.

Jack runs his other hand through his newly-greying hair self-consciously. "Hardly a boy," he protests, but then he grins at Ianto. "But being real certainly makes up for it," he promises, and Ianto laughs with him. They watch the sky for a while longer but if Ginger is out there they cannot see him.

They see him again the following day, and the day after that, but it is as though he and Jack are plugged in to the same circuit. They go in waves. Ginger gets duller the longer he stays in the Hub, becoming grey and lost and quiet every time until he disappears, at which point Jack becomes lost and nervous, watching the CCTV cameras incessantly for any sign of Ginger's bright hair in the streets. When Ginger comes back, energetic and beaming about his latest adventure, Jack finally relaxes, until Ginger becomes distant again and Jack becomes anxious that he will leave again. Ginger comes back but he stays away longer and longer each time, and Jack begins to be sad even when Ginger is there. Jack lives in nervous anticipation of the next time Ginger will leave.

Ianto sees in Jack something of himself when he was caring for Lisa after her conversion. Jack is so invested in Ginger he cannot let go, even though the ties Jack wants between them are ripping them both to pieces.

Ianto watches Jack silently, and it is Ianto's turn to offer comfort, to hold Jack when Jack sighs in the night or blinks away tears in the wind on the roof.

They have sex again for the first time on the roof. Ianto comes up prepared one evening with four blankets and Jack appreciates his thoughtfulness. After, they stare up at the stars. Ianto thinks about how differently Jack must look at the stars--how different they must seem to a man who has been to so many of them, in comparison to a man who has spent so much of his time underground on one small little planet. Ianto feels he should say something, but he cannot think what, and when he finally tears his gaze away from the tiny points of light, he realizes that Jack is not looking up at all, but is smiling down at him. Ianto realizes, profoundly and for the first time, that Jack is only a man. Ianto has a tendency to deify him, they all have, because he is so far away from the rest of them, separated by alienness in a way Ronon isn't even when telling a story about growing up on Sateda. Jack has had a brush with godhead, but he is mortal again now, and imperfect, and Ianto loves him. He pulls Jack in close to himself and shivers so Jack will wrap the blankets closer around them.

Ginger finally leaves for good. Ianto walks around his blue police box, puzzled, and Jack whispers in his ear that it's bigger on the inside. Ianto smirks and Jack grins at him meaningfully. Jack is not above begging Ginger to stay, however.

"You could visit, at least," Jack wheedles, but Ginger shakes his head.

"That never actually makes it easier," Ginger says softly, resting his hands gently on Jack's shoulders. Jack tangles his hands in Ginger's hair all of a sudden, and kisses Ginger with a hint of desperation.

"I wish I'd never met you," Jack says, tears streaming freely down his face.

"Bah," Ginger says dismissively, grinning, and Jack smiles back at him through the tears. "You're the same now as you were when I met you," Ginger promises.

Jack seems determined to be morose. "Yes, alone," he says, still pleading with Ginger to stay.

"Don't be stupid," Ginger says. "You're not alone, you've got a charming tea-boy, another alien--" Ronon seems to realize this refer to him and quirks an eyebrow-- "a psycho psychic, a team to help you save the Earth, a pterodactyl, and a baby on the way. Remember," Ginger continues, stepping into the blue box and leaning his top half out to finish, "the twenty-first century is when it all happens." He turns briefly to Ianto: "Thanks for all the mashed bananas."

"You're welcome," Ianto responds automatically.

"So long!" Ginger says, grinning wildly, and he disappears into the box, and then the box disappears as well. Jack cries into Ianto's shoulder for a few minutes and Ianto hands him a handkerchief, refrains from complaining when Jack smears snot on his suit jacket, and plans to expense the dry cleaning bill. Gwen cries as well, though Ianto thinks her mourning mostly already passed when Ginger changed from a cute baby to a strange-looking man.

Ianto waits until Jack has pulled himself together to say, "Sir, what did he mean by 'a baby on the way'?" Everyone looks at everyone else in surprise for a moment. Owen's eyes finally settle on Gwen, with some degree of alarm, and her eyes get larger than usual and she shakes her head vigorously. Schuldig's eyes narrow on Jack, however, and he points definitively at Jack's lower abdomen and says, "*That's* a baby."

***

The twenty-first century was when it all happened.

Gwen

Gwen became pregnant shortly after Jack and talked excitedly for months about how they would raise their families together, but Ianto knew that Gwen's retirement was quickly approaching. Jack convinced Detective Swanson to give Gwen a desk job, and after Gwen no longer remembered that there was anything she was forgetting, Jack still sometimes watched her and Rhys and the little boy on CCTV from the privacy of his office.

Owen

Owen left Torchwood 3 as well, soon after the news that Gwen and Rhys were expecting--he took over leadership of Torchwood 7, which was a monastery in Ampleforth.

"You're becoming a monk," Gwen said, incredulous. Owen simply nodded without looking up from his paperwork.

"Well, I didn't see that coming," Jack admitted.

"What's a monk?" Ronon asked Ianto.

"Celibate," Ianto said. Ronon frowned. Owen was nervous about the new position, but Jack clapped him on the back and told Owen he had every confidence that Owen would do fine, and Owen seemed genuinely reassured.

Ronon

New recruits joined Torchwood 3 to rebuild the team, and Ronon took over training new staff. Jack "assisted" periodically, but really, Ronon was better at covering all of the basics. Ianto's reptuation among the new members of Torchwood 3 was as the father of Jack's baby, and not as the tea boy, and Ianto struggled to decide if this was a step up or a step back in his life.

Lisa Rose

Owen returned a few months later to deliver Jack and Ianto's baby. Ianto named her Lisa Rose.

Time passed differently once Lisa was there. Ianto moved into the Hub for real, and he and Jack refurbished and moved into well-shielded quarters in the west quandrant. Jack insisted on decorating the nursery with pink chicks, despite Ianto's protests regarding both realism and aesthetics.

Lisa Rose was the most beautiful child in the world, Ianto knew. She was pretty and clever, and he and Jack both spoiled her terribly. She grew into a wonderful young woman despite their ineptitude as parents, and the ways in which they spoiled her can't even compare to when Ginger showed up again in his blue box--looking not a day older than when they last saw him--and the entire time-space continuum was twisted around Lisa Rose's finger. Jack cried when Ginger offered to take her for a ride, and Ginger swore he was going bring her back safe and sound. Jack didn't look like he thoroughly believed the promise, but he let Lisa Rose go anyway, and wrapped his arm around Ianto's waist as the box dissipated.

She called, sometimes, from the end of the world or the beginning of time, and Jack and Ianto held their faces close enough together to both listen to the same old-fashioned telephone receiver.


End file.
